Tortoise Media reported falling revenue of £6.1m in 2023 and a loss of £2.9m as it shifted focus towards audio and smaller B2B events.
Total losses for the publisher, which agreed a deal to acquire The Observer just before Christmas, now stand at more than £20.3m since it launched in 2019.
Tortoise however saw a significant improvement on its 2022 loss of £4.6m and it reported breaking even in the final quarter of 2023.
Since launch Tortoise has shifted away from low-margin public events and long-form written digital journalism, after finding few readers were willing to spend more than a few minutes reading online content.
Instead it has focused increasingly on producing podcasts and, since 2023, corporate events called The Tortoise Business Roundtable. Tortoise says sponsors are offered the chance to speak at fortnightly roundtable discussions and network with leaders from “government and society” to “advance the responsible business agenda”.
Big Tortoise B2B events have included the Responsible Energy Forum held in partnership with Rothschild Foundation and Brunswick Group.
Tortoise says in its latest accounts that it decided to pull away from “some high-cost, low profit” events. It reported that audio revenue (which includes sponsorship, advertising and rights deals) was up 32% year on year.
In early 2021 Tortoise reported having nearly 50,000 paying members. There was no detail on subscriber numbers in the latest accounts, which said: “2023 proved to be a challenging year for consumers and as a result the competition for news and information subscriptions were hard fought.
“Despite this, our mixed business model – advertising, content services, memberships, IP and data – has meant Tortoise is well placed to adjust to changes in consumer behaviour.”
Tortoise ended 2023 with £1.7m of shareholder funds (compared with £4.1m in 2022) after raising an additional £1.1m from shareholders in December of that year. Tortoise said it raised an additional £2.7m from investors and creditors in 2024.
Tortoise reduced its editorial and production team to 44 in 2023 (from 52 in 2022) and increased the commercial team to 14 (from 12). Overall headcount fell by eight to 64 and it spent £520,000 on redundancies.
Pay for directors fell from £583,000 to £397,000 in the period.
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